There was one relationship, however, that suffered no loss as a result of the Reedville crisis. Steve and Kay now found themselves back in the position they had been in eleven years before, with Steve hovering on the brink of collapse and Kay as his sole reason for hope and his sole support. The cloud of disillusionment and apathy that hung over him everywhere else was mercifully absent from his home. His awakening to the fact that the very uses, the good and peaceful uses, to which he had trusted that God would ultimately put the fruits of science, were themselves the catalyst of immense personal and societal degeneration had him backed into the same corner that its wartime uses had backed him into eleven years before. But now there was no obvious escape route, no clear recourse to a better alternative. If a good God was directing human destiny above the stage of human folly, where was the evidence of it? Surely He could not be guiding and blessing advances in science if they were destroying man both from without and from within! So once again Steve found himself falling back on Kay and starting all over from there. She, after all, was the very embodiment of goodness, a goodness which if it had been the common property of the human race would have taken the world in a completely different direction.
Kay, for her part, fully grasped how much he needed the soothing effect of her love and affection now. She nourished within herself those qualities she knew he cherished most, creating for him a sanctuary within their home where hope could be reborn in him. She sought to distract him from pondering the issues that had brought him down so low, not by artificially trivializing them but by creating an atmosphere in the little world of their home that superseded them. She knew of no other way to prevent the man she loved from falling to pieces, and her with him.
Firmly she resolved to devote all she had to sustaining her husband. She considered for a time resigning from teaching, but thought better of it. Mary Thorsheim, to whom she confided everything, helped her to reason that Steve ought not to be aware of any special or forced efforts on her part to buoy him up, but that she could help him best just by being her winsome self.
So she made a point of enriching their home life with things that make life worth living. Almost every day she brought home with her from school a tale about something especially fine which a pupil of hers had done or said during the day which she managed to inject skillfully into their conversation. Sometimes she would relate how she had tried to bring out the best in a challenging situation, and occasionally even Steve would cite something encouraging from his day. She purchased a set of devotional books written by a popular pastor from Minneapolis. The message drawn from each day’s anecdote always affirmed the divine order of things in some way, and Steve found them good therapy. In addition, Kay’s sense of humor, always one of her assets, sharpened and lightened things up in response to life’s little anomalies day by day, providing unexpected little turns in their conversation that made them both laugh.
And, of course, he got to embrace her every night and hold her soft warmth as close to himself as he could. And she loved it, and let him know it.
Naturally, Steve was not unmoved by the peace and loveliness that radiated from his wife and greeted him whenever he came home. They were so genuinely the products of mutual admiration and love, and so perfectly the expression of what he was seeking on a universal scale, that he would now find himself being drawn home every day the moment classes were over. There he could wash off any “radioactive fallout” that had alighted on him during the day. And there he could rekindle whatever ray of hope remained in him that God might yet turn things around in the world.
Thanks to Kay, home was a refuge and sanctuary for Stephan Pearson in the months following the debacle in Reedville. Reluctantly he left it in the morning and eagerly he retreated to it at the end of the day. It was his one hallowed spot on the face of the earth. It kept him going from one day to the next. The goodness he experienced in his wife had to come from somewhere, he told himself.
But why, he asked himself over and over again, aren’t there more people like her in the world? Why can’t every home be like ours?
XVII
Toward the end of November, Kay began to suspect that something was wrong with her. At first she thought of many reasons besides the obvious one why she should not be all right: The strain of coping with Steve’s neediness was telling on her more than she realized, or perhaps as a very diabetic thirty-seven years of age she was prematurely losing her youthful regularity, or … or…. But when she started having serious problems with the delicate balance of her insulin dosage, she was forced to ask for an urgent consultation with Dr. Pederson. And when she returned home from her appointment (it was two days before Christmas), she was a different woman.
In those two days she did more concentrated praying and thinking than she had ever done in any other two days in her life before. Weighing all aspects, she concluded that the best time to break the news to Steve would be after the midnight carol and Communion service on Christmas Eve.
If initially the news had left her aghast, what would it do to Steve? It negated all of his careful efforts over the past eleven years to avoid just such a thing. It had ripped open all those longings within her heart which she had stubbornly held in check because she didn’t want a repeat of the painful “clash” that had settled the issue once and for all at the beginning of their marriage. There was no doubt in her mind about when and where the breakdown had occurred, or about who was responsible for it. But now that it was a reality, fear and hope were at war with each other in her. Tears of joy mingled with tears of apprehension. She found herself returning again and again to the information Dr. Pederson had shared with her moments after breaking the news to her.
“There is something you and Steve should know,” he had begun. “But first let me review a few things you may already know. As soon as your baby’s pancreas becomes large enough to function, it will begin supplying both the baby and you with natural insulin in ever increasing amounts. As a result, your insulin dosage must be decreased proportionately, as you may already be discovering. I will have to monitor this frequently if you decide to keep the baby. Towards the end of your pregnancy, the baby’s pancreas will have become so overdeveloped that you will not be taking any injections at all. At the moment of childbirth, this creates a double crisis. The baby must immediately undergo an operation to reduce its oversized pancreas before the baby succumbs to a huge overdose of the insulin you can no longer use. And your dosage also has to be immediately restored, but to what level? All we can do in these circumstances is to guess at the right amount. On top of that, any bleeding induced by childbirth can become very dangerous to a diabetic mother whose blood doesn’t clot normally.
“That leaves us with three possibilities at this point. Sometimes the baby dies in the womb. This can happen at any stage, resulting either in a D and C or a stillbirth. Sometimes the baby is born alive and rapidly succumbs to an oversupply of insulin. And sometimes an operation on the baby to remove the excess pancreas allows the child to develop normally in every way. Of course, there are risks to the mother in all three possibilities.
“What I am driving at is this: the last alternative has enjoyed a growing success rate in recent years. There are specialists who have become highly skilled at performing the necessary surgery on the baby and others whose skills focus on the mother’s urgent needs. Even so, a large risk remains, but it has been reduced enough so that at this point physicians are tending to present the facts to the parents and leave the decision in their hands.
“Of course, much as I respect the sacredness of life in the womb, there are times with a certain severity group of diabetic mothers when failure to terminate the pregnancy early is a virtual death sentence both for the baby and for the mother. And you, Kay, taking account of your age and your medical history, could very well fall into that group. I shall send all your records to specialists in Minneapolis this very day for assessment. Their assessment, together with my advice, will give you and Steve something to base
your decision on.”
Kay had gone home spellbound by the thread of hope held out to her by Dr. Pederson. He spoke as though there was a real chance that she and Steve could have a baby who would “develop normally in every way”! This would unite them in a new world, the world of a living soul of their very own whom they could love together and in whom they could inculcate the goodness the world needed so badly. How a child would bless them both at this point in their lives! Steve would surely not yield to despair when he had in his own arms a precious life to protect and guide. All they had to do now was say yes to the decision lying before them. The risk involved? Steve himself had drawn the conclusion that a life without risks is just about the worst thing that can happen to the human soul.
This was the thread of hope on which Kay strung her heart. Steve might well shrink back at first, but now she was armed with a fact for him to take into account, not just her feelings. That fact would stand, given any amount of encouragement from the specialists in Minneapolis, and it would stare him in the eye no matter what he said. Its power would work on him with time. Yes, it would work on him! And she and Steve would have their baby!
The Midnight Service on Christmas Eve was exhilarating. The whole church was illumined only by the soft radiance of the candles on the altar, the white bulbs on the Christmas tree in the chancel, dim recessed lights in the vaulted ceiling, and at the end by candles held by all the worshippers. The sweet tangy scent of pine needles was the incense offered to the newborn Savior on this night of nights as men and angels strove to sing His praises.
“Hark, the herald angels sing,
‘Glory to the Newborn King!’”
“What Child is this who laid to rest
On Mary’s lap is sleeping,
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet
While shepherds watch are keeping.”
“Ah, dearest Jesus, Holy Child,
Make Thee a bed, soft, undefiled,
Within my heart, that it may be
A quiet chamber kept for Thee.”
“Silent night, holy night,
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child,
Holy Infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace.”
As the story unfolded in song and words, Kay held Steve’s arm in hers as in a vise, tugging on it every time shivers ran up and down her body. During the sacred moment of the Holy Childbirth itself, as the choir was singing the third stanza of Phillip Brooks’ sublime carol, Kay heard every word as if addressed to her and Steve:
“How silently, how silently
The wondrous Gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His Heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive Him, still
The dear Christ enters in.”
By the time they arrived home, a sort of beatific afterglow of peace had settled over Kay. Fear and doubt about what lay ahead of them had melted out of her heart. She had assumed until now that she and Steve would deal with this somehow by sitting down, coolly calculating the risks and mutually agreeing on the right course of action. Now this assumption was miles from her mind.
The aura of the Holy Night had had a soothing effect on Steve, too. As they entered the tidy intimacy of their living room at about 1:30 a.m. where only the lights on the Christmas tree were glowing, he put his arm around his wife and drew her down into the big soft davenport facing the tree. This tender gesture was all Kay needed to unlock her hallowed secret. Just a moment or two of silence, of soaking up the gentle mists of love, and she could hold it in no longer.
“Steve, my love. I have something wonderful to give you for Christmas this year.”
She paused. Then without lifting her head from his shoulder, but squeezing his hand a little tighter, she said, “We are going to have a baby.”
Steve’s jaw dropped. He tried to say something that didn’t come. Kay sat up straight and turned full toward him, clasping both of his hands in hers and beaming brightly into his eyes.
“What on earth do you mean by that?” he gasped.
Kay’s grin broadened and became as contagious as she could make it.
“I mean that next July you are going to be a father and I am going to be a mother. Dr. Pederson says there are doctors these days who specialize in this. So now we can have our own baby, and it is already inside me.”
It came at Steve too suddenly to grasp. He nodded slowly, said nothing, and sat in a daze for a very long moment. Then he reached out and took Kay by the arms. He drew her in to him again and, assured by the warmth of her body against his and the feel of their arms tightly wound around each other, he tried to absorb the reality of what she had just told him.
For a full half hour, this embrace of theirs in the soft light of the Christmas tree was their only communication.
Then Steve took a deep breath and conceded, “We’ll have to look into this.”
XVIII
“Looking into this” took the form of a visit to Dr. Pederson’s office the day after Christmas. All day long on Christmas Day Kay had dropped little hints, as discreetly as she could, about the joys of parenthood and how grateful they could be that medical science had greatly reduced the risks in it for them. The only thing that had kept Steve on an even keel throughout the day was his phone call to Dr. Pederson at his home that morning and the physician’s willingness to meet with them the very next day.
It was no secret to Steve that Kay had been suppressing and sublimating her strong maternal instincts for the past eleven years. This was clear in her devotion to her students and in the way she talked about them to him. He admired her greatly for letting her students be the outlet for these instincts, but he never lost the sense that way down deep she was always poised to take advantage of any unforeseen opportunity to have a child of their own. Now all of that was history. Kay was pregnant, and in a moment of weakness he had allowed it to happen. To be sure, if she was right that the danger was all but gone, that could alter everything. But he would have to have that on the best authority.
Kay’s irrepressible joy and fearless assurance were infectious. He had never experienced her so assertive. Her mind was racing ahead to all the blessings in store for them by becoming parents, and what she had to say about it was persuasive indeed! All day long he wavered between being caught up with her in her enthusiasm and coping with his fears, fears first of all for her safety, and then also fears of how to go about raising a child well in a decadent society in an increasingly dangerous world. He even caught himself wondering if anyone had the right to bring children into a world like this at all.
In view of all this, the strongest affirmation she could get out of him was, “We’ll see, we’ll see….”
The next morning, Dr. Pederson, who was also a personal friend of theirs, wasted no time in taking them into his confidence.
“Yes,” he answered with reserve when Steve asked him about new developments. “Some real progress has been made in this field in recent years. Some diabetic women are giving birth to several children, some are content with one, and some are advised against child-bearing altogether. It all depends on the history and the severity of each case.”
“And in Kay’s case, what would be your advice?”
“Well, I am not a specialist in this field. That’s why I sent copies of all my records on Kay to a specialist in Minneapolis. His reply came in the morning mail, and I have taken the time to examine it carefully. He says that her history is in her favor. She has controlled her condition very well over the years. But her age and her severity index are not. Piecing it all together, he says that many women in Kay’s category have one baby, but seldom more than one. And, he adds,”—the doctor’s voice dropped—”it is not unheard of to lose a patient and/or her baby in Kay’s category.”
“Not unheard of!” cried Steve. “I hope he appen
ded more specific statistics than that!”
“Six percent,” replied the physician slowly. “Six percent in her category don’t make it, according to the figures I have right here. Which is, of course, a great improvement over what it once was.”
“Well, that settles that!” exclaimed Steve. “We can’t play with that kind of a risk.”
“But Steve!” cried out Kay. “Only six percent! I would have been happy with a 10 or 20 percent mortality rate. Only six percent! Darling, I’ll be all right.”
The physician lowered his head as though he were examining the report even more closely.
“And the primary reason for losing the patient is blood loss?” demanded Dr. Pearson, unheeding.
“Yes. Blood loss and failure to reestablish quickly and correctly the dosage of insulin the mother requires, suddenly deprived of the insulin she has been getting from the baby’s pancreas. Blood loss becomes a major issue if there are complications in the delivery that create excessive bleeding.”
“And you think I could actually consent to let you take that kind of a risk?” Steve demanded, turning to Kay. “These data speak for themselves. No husband in his right mind would choose to put the life of his beloved on the block like that!”
A Grain of Wheat Page 35